Mr. Séamas Ó Muilleaneoir:

That is the understatement of the century. Serious fundamental issues have to be addressed. I will go back to Deputy Pearse Doherty and try to answer his question about our communications with the Department of Finance and the Central Bank. In the case of the Central Bank, the PBFI has had no direct contact. However, we know that a representative of the German SBFIC in Bonn met them about three years ago when that person came here to meet us. They acknowledged that gap in the market in their discussions and it is part of a paper which is referenced in our submission. I met Deputy Michael McGrath in his Dáil office with two consultants from the German Sparkassen foundation. Out of that came a 42-page paper, which is also available to the committee. It was submitted in due course to all of the political parties, the Department of Finance and nearly everybody got a version of it in some form or other, even though it was a confidential document or had limited confidentiality about it.

That document is important but what is more important is that we engaged a little bit with the Secretary General of the Department of Finance in 2015 and were told the matter was under serious consideration and not to worry. Having pressed the issue in terms of the follow-up from the Department, we got a reply from the Minister and from the Secretary General on 7 and 8 January last year. Personally speaking, those two letters are an embarrassment and I would not even publish them. I will say no more about them. The fact that they could even be written is an extraordinary statement of either utter stupidity or absolute complicity in the structure of the problem. I am not talking about the solution; I am talking about the problem. That is the answer to the question. We have no communications. As a result of those two letters, we set about establishing the public banking alliance for the last general election to try to shove the issue into the public domain. That has been very successful in forcing the issue onto the programme for Government and it has been very helpful in terms of some of the proposals being put forward with respect to post offices. We have been prodding that issue about the Kiwi model. Does that answer the question?